Defective by design?

Why: After its establishment by IEEE earlier this year, CSD brought together 13 authorities on software design from RSA, Cigital, Google, Twitter and other organizations to discuss their experiences in software security.

The workshop's aim was to expand the field of cybersecurity by directing the attention of software architects away from implementation bugs, which are commonly the focus of developers, and toward identifying fundamental design flaws that have led to security breaches in the past.

After discussing "the types of flaws they either identified in their own internal design reviews or that were available from external data," participants agreed on a list of 10 flaws that persist in software architecture.

CSD's recommendations include defining an approach that ensures that all data is explicitly validated in order to rid systems and components of "assumptions about the data they operate on" and specifying how systems should handle sensitive data to identify and rectify the "trust boundaries" data must cross in transit.

FCW investigated efforts by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to improve a joint data repository on military and veteran suicides. Something as impersonal and mundane as incomplete datasets could be exacerbating a national tragedy.